We were having a conversation in Intellectual Bootcamp — which has been really great by the way, I recommend you join! — and Steven Levy (I’m pretty sure) asked a question about communicative technologies and how they relate to ethics and I said something pretty clever. I said that ethics are downstream of communicative technologies.
This is not a flippant remark at all. This is actually literally and entirely true in the case of the dominant ethical systems we have, the three major monotheistic religions as well as in axial age belief systems like Confucianism. Ethics is absolutely not something you work out through the application of reason or any kind of philosophical system like ‘the golden rule.’ For the ‘people of the book,’ ethics is precisely that which is written in the book, with ethical implications to be teased out of the book and applied to daily life, and the book, which we understand to be part of Martin Gurri’s “second wave” of the advent of the alphabet, is a technology arising at a particular moment in time and with particular properties.
If we continue to follow Gurri’s schematic of the ‘five waves’ of technology, we find that the first ‘wave,’ the invention of writing, is largely embedded within a priestly hierarchical system where the sacrifice and the will of the king, which is understood as a manifestation of the will of the gods, determines the ethics of the society as a whole. The ‘third wave,’ with its emphasis on widely-distributed printed text, favors an ethics built on reason and the discussion of individual actors. The Protestant Reformation, with its attention to text, is a manifestation of the third wave, and national constitutions — part of a process of reasoned ethical debate — become close to sacred documents. The ‘fourth wave’ of mass media seems to produce an ethics that is built around access to the instruments of mass media. The ‘celebrity’ becomes a uniquely important figure. In a real sense, the celebrity — the person with the camera on them — is the only figure who matters in the society. Everything is forgiven them so long as they can hold the attention of the camera, while everyone else, from the ethical logic of the fourth wave, is null and has to take what comfort they can from being part of communal structures held over from the ages of revealed religion or of reasoned print discourse. The age of mass media has been short enough that it didn’t really break up the constitution-based political process of an earlier era, but it was starting to move in that direction, with the public voting on shows like American Idol, and then culminating in a reality star getting elected president. The fifth wave — the digital revolution — has its own properties, which are basically the properties of electricity or maybe more specifically those of quanta, and it’s worth itemizing those to try to understand what the ethical landscape is of our era:
In the fifth wave, communication is instantaneous. What is really happening in our civilization, argues Paul Virilio, is that humanity is coming into contact with the speed of light, which is experienced by us as the instantaneous.
Communication is ubiquitous. It becomes possible to create essentially infinite copies — as many copies as for anyone who navigates to the content. The possibility emerges of everybody on the planet looking at the same content — as two thirds seem to have done, for instance, with this video by El Chombo of a gyrating lizard. Value becomes determined by reach.
Communication can toggle on or off. This follows from properties of electricity and the excitations of quanta. The analog world is basically a world of degrees — things work or don’t work always to some extent. Conversation can never exactly be turned off — just physically exited. Books can either be read or not read or in some famous cases burned — at the very high temperature of 451 degrees Fahrenheit. But with the quantum properties of electricity there is always the possibility of deleting, of the device simply powering off, of going from existence to something very like non-existence. Ubiquity and instantaneousness are paired with the possibility of the screen suddenly going blank.
Communication tends to start in one distinct node and move outwards from there. There’s a greater tendency for the individual — or large collections of individuals — to speak in diffusion than for, say, a crowd in a square to shout with one voice.
The ethics that follow from all of that are pretty straightforward — it’s about maximum output, and with as wide a reach as possible. It’s not really a surprise that the stars of the digital era — Trump, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, etc — are marked by their near-perfect sociopathy, their lack of interest in anything that isn’t attention on themselves.
If it can be a little abstract to talk in this way about properties of electricity, maybe it’s fun to think about different technologies we already have and how each one has taught us to live with it. The term that Andrey Mir uses for this is an “affordance” (and this whole mode of analysis is pretty cribbed from Mir to be honest). What I’m trying to offer that’s slightly different is thinking about this in terms of ethics — that each new technology seems to teach us an ethical mode, or style of behavior, to go with it:
Telegraph — terse, ‘scientific’ style. Heightened attention to economy.
Telephone — friendliness, ‘checking in.’ Hypersocial sensibility.
Electric lighting — nightlife, being always ‘on.’
Radio — joys of being part of a disparate crowd, joys of being silent and tuned in to the radio. Stark division — as with all mass media — between the small numbers of ‘producers,’ who get the money and the power but are there to ‘serve,’ and the ‘consumers,’ who get to relax but have their money slowly bleeding away from them in the process of engaging with the mass media.
Film — joys of being in a physicalized crowd consuming the same story together. A certain ability to hold long-form information, comparable to books although typically dumbed down.
Television — joys of relaxing at home, in the disparate crowd. Tuned in to the same periodization as everyone else. Friendship in watching the same shows at the same time and being able to talk about them with one another the next day. Intimacy in watching shows with someone else.
Personal computer — a certain technical savvy, ability to figure out all the wires and keyboard shortcuts. Real distinction between those who know the basics of programming, or those who have at least read the manual, and those who don’t.
VHS, fax machine, cassette player — essentially the same. World War II-era super-state technology becoming available to the consumer market. The society splits into three — passive consumers, ‘geeks’ who understand the technology enough to fiddle with it and explain it to anyone who will listen, and then a small number of large companies that actually produce the technology and give the impression of omnipotence.
CD — sleek futuristic sensibility. No longer the need to wind up or geek out as with tape cassettes.
Instant messenger — multi-tasking, brain split into neatly compartmentalized sections. Professionalism understood as careful demarcations of what can be said in what formats.
Texting — decisions over what format is right for what communications. Phone call for in-depth hashing-out, texting for frictionless exchange.
Email — status as having a lot of emails coming in. Distinctions between more professionalized (although still casual) emails and informal exchange in texting and messaging, with abbreviations, emojis, etc.
World Wide Web — sense of getting lost online, joys and sinking feeling of ‘surfing.’ Tendency to create a black mirror to reality — anybody shunned in real life getting their revenge online.
Smart phone — ability to be completely self-contained, never bored when connected to the phone. Very personal relationship to the apps and features on one’s phone.
Social media — highly, frenetically social, putting out constant missives about what one is doing — or else consuming everybody else’s missives. Tendency towards a hive, towards fervent agreement. Clear identifiers of users and counts of followers puts heightened premium on reputation — encourages group-think.
AI — shift away from group exchange of social media, tendency to have relationship entirely with device. Seesaw of validation and repudiation from chatbot.
In every case — and these are meant to be fairly minor examples — the technology reshapes our behavior whenever we are in contact with it. It teaches us how to act in relation to it — a greater or lesser degree of friendliness, a certain amount of know-how or just passivity. But what really matters are the properties of electricity itself, and these — as best as I can tell — are not very humane, have nothing, really, to do with ethical human behavior.
Thanks for referencing, Sam! Ethical systems are certainly among media affordances.
I would add two considerations.
1. Media effects are not linear; they are compounding. The waves of effects from newer media collide with the effects of older media. Since all cultures have their own pace and history of media adoption, each nation receives its own unique blend of compunding media effects.
That is how the US differs from Canada despite both being in the era of AI: there was no colonial bourgeois revolution in Canada driven by print literacy and newspapers, and therefore the printed word has been less prominent in Canada, with a multitude of consequences, including very weak newspapers and public debate.
2. Communication technologies, from writing to social media, have reversed the focus on the message into a focus on the user. Writing was reader-blind and focused on content delivery (to whoever could read); social media are user-centric and nearly content-blind. Everything between writing and social media represented this progression: from a focus on content to a focus on the user. Among the other ethical consequences, this is how identity politics emerged in the era of television and reached its extremes in the era of social media.
The entire evolution of media has been a history-long identity training of humankind, and this has been a major factor in shaping ethical systems.
(Here is the chapter from The Digital Reversal about it: "The reversal of identity into credentials: the fallout of media targeting" - https://www.andreymir.com/p/the-reversal-of-identity-into-credentials)
I've wondered this before as well, but I honestly forgot what my train of thought was when trying to cast ethics as a technology – reviewing my Aristotle and such, I am reminded that this idea doesn't really make sense; at least not in the history of occidental thought.
"Techne" (i.e. instrumentalized technology) aims at production (poiesis). The goal is to create an external product, like a house or a statue. Ethics aims at action (praxis). The goal however (in ancient Western philosophy) is living well (eudaimonia), where the action itself is the end. Teche-qua-teche cannot be its own end.
In techne, value resides entirely in the finished object. A beautifully crafted chair is good, even if the carpenter who made it is a terrible person. In ethics, value resides in the agent's character. An action is only truly virtuous if the person does it knowingly, deliberately, and from a stable moral character. Kant doesn't care if virtue is done anonymous or not as long as it comes from conscientious "inner" duty, whereas Jesus does insist that the left hand should not know what the right is doing, come ethical actions (Matthew 6:3-4).
So, techne relies on a set of universal rules or manual techniques that can be taught systematically. Ethics relies on phronesis (practical wisdom), which cannot be reduced to a simple rulebook or "medium". It requires judging each unique life situation case by case and having one's "skin in the game of life" which techne (as a modality) cannot abide by.
That all said, I do want to remember what I was originally thinking! Maybe it was more along these lines: if you were a higher-dimensional being and wanted to impart an ecological technology to unruly mortals (i.e. a system to maintain the Earth) who couldn't possibly understand all the variables, then might that techne takes the form of ethics (e.g. Ten Commandments?) Like, maybe our God-given ethics are an ecological technology? Alas, I digress.